ENCI Returns from Türkiye

16 October 2025

Photo: Charles Steitler

The ENCI team in Ankara: Philipp Pätzold, Andreas Beckert, Cécile Michel, Samaneh Ehteram, and Andreas Schropp.

After its second deployment at the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara, the mobile CT scanner, used by CSMC researchers to examine cultural artefacts around the world, was also in operation this time at the Archaeological Museum in Kayseri.

Postal communication in ancient Mesopotamia was an unreliable affair. Quite often, the sender and recipient of a letter were separated by hundreds of kilometres. The letters, written on cuneiform tablets and enclosed within clay envelopes to protect them from prying eyes, travelled with caravans across the desert. However, it was not uncommon for these letters to be lost en route or to fail to reach recipients who had moved away or passed away. Hundreds of such letters remain stored in their original clay envelopes in museums and archives worldwide to this day. In some cases, no one has read them for over 5,000 years.

The Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara houses a particularly important collection of such sealed letters, originating from major excavation sites such as Hattusa and Kültepe. These texts are believed to provide crucial insights into the economic, legal, and private affairs of the inhabitants of these early settlements. For the study of antiquity, and especially for Assyriology, they are therefore of immense interest.

Reading these hidden texts without destroying their envelopes has been made possible by researchers from the CSMC and the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY), through the development of ENCI. The acronym stands for ‘Extracting Non-destructively Cuneiform Inscriptions’ and refers to the world’s first mobile CT scanner specifically designed for the study of cultural artefacts.

The compact, mobile apparatus – at just over 400 kilogrammes, a veritable lightweight for a CT scanner – enables researchers, for the first time, to scan clay tablets non-destructively directly on site in the museum, avoiding the need to transport these delicate objects. A team consisting of experts in Assyriology, X-ray physics, and computer science produces precise 3D reconstructions of the tablets inside.